Institute for the Study of Gender Law and Policy
Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship
Friday and Saturday November 3-4, 2006
Hofstra Organizers and Moderators
Linda C. McClain (coordinator) - contact: Linda.C.McClain@hofstra.edu
Joanna Grossman(coordinator) - contact: Joanna.L.Grossman@hofstra.edu
Nora Demleitner
Barbara Stark
Margaret Abraham
Amy Baehr
Cheryl Mwaria
Lisa Merrill
Panelists and Speakers
| Martha Albertson Fineman (keynote speaker) | Ziba Mir-Hosseini |
| Regina Austin (luncheon speaker) | Uma Narayan |
| Kathryn Abrams | Leslye Obiora |
| Deborah Anker | Anne Peters |
| Susanne Baer | Judith Resnik |
| Beverly Baines | Carol Sanger |
| Karima Bennoune | Elizabeth Schneider |
| Mary Anne Case | Mary Lyndon Shanley |
| Jane Maslow Cohen | Katharine B. Silbaugh |
| Brenda Cossman | Rogers M. Smith |
| Maxine Eichner | Anisseh Van Engeland-Nourai |
| Janet Halley | Deborah M. Weissman |
| Tracy Higgins | Joan C. Williams |
| Nancy J. Hirschmann | |
| Martha T. McCluskey |
Hofstra Organizers and Moderators
Linda C. McClain, a co-organizer of the Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship Conference, is the Rivkin Radler Distinguished Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School. She is a nationally recognized scholar who speaks and writes regularly on family law, gender and law, feminist legal theory, and jurisprudence. At Hofstra, she teaches courses in these areas, as well as in property and welfare law. Her recent book, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2006), offers a liberal feminist perspective on the relationship between family life and politics and on a number of contested issues of family law and policy, among them, governmental promotion of heterosexual marriage and the denial of marriage to same-sex couples, the regulation of family life through welfare policy, sex education, and constitutional rights to reproductive freedom. She is currently working on a book on civil society. Her articles have appeared in many books and legal journals, including Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Fordham law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, Texas Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. She has organized major symposia on "Legal and Constitutional Implications of Calls to Revive Civil Society, "in 75 Chicago-Kent Law Review 289-612 (2000), and on "Marriage, Families, and Democracy," in 32 Hofstra Law Review 23-421 (2003).
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Joanna Grossman joined the Hofstra faculty in 1999 and became the Associate Dean for Faculty Development in 2004. She has also taught as an associate professor at Tulane Law School and as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. She graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she served as the articles development editor of the Stanford Law Review and was elected to Order of the Coif. Professor Grossman served as a law clerk to Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, before spending a year as staff counsel at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., as recipient of the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship. She practiced law from 1996 to 1998 at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Williams & Connolly.
Professor Grossman teaches courses in family law, sex discrimination, and trusts and estates. Her primary research interests are sexual harassment, work/family issues, pregnancy discrimination, state regulation of marriage, and the history of family law. Professor Grossman has published articles in the Stanford Law Review, Harvard Women's Law Journal, and the American Journal of Legal History, among other journals. She co-edited and introduced a recent symposium in the Family Law Quarterly on third-party rights and obligations with respect to children. She has also co-organized conferences, including "Marriage, Families, and Democracy," held at Hofstra in 2003, and "Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship," to be held at Hofstra in November, 2006.
Professor Grossman is a regular columnist for FindLaw's Writ and has served on the editorial board of Perspectives, the magazine of the ABA's Commission on Women in the Profession. Professor Grossman was selected to deliver Hofstra University's Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2004 and was inducted into Long Island's "40 Under 40" in 2005.
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Nora V. Demleitner is vice dean for academic affairs and professor of law at Hofstra University School of Law. Professor Demleitner received her J.D. from Yale Law School, her B.A. from Bates College, and also holds an LL.M. with distinction in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown University Law Center. After law school Professor Demleitner clerked for the Hon. Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She testified in front of the U.S. Senate on behalf of Justice Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Demleitner teaches and has written widely in the areas of criminal, comparative, and immigration law. Her special expertise is in sentencing and collateral sentencing consequences. Professor Demleitner is a managing editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter, and serves on the executive editorial board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She is the lead author of Sentencing Law and Policy, the major casebook on sentencing law, published by Aspen Law & Business. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford, Michigan, and Minnesota law reviews, among others. Professor Demleitner lectures widely in the United States and Europe. She has served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the Sant'Anna Institute of Advanced Research in Pisa, Italy. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Germany. Professor Demleitner regularly teaches a course on "Human Rights of Women and Children" as part of the Intercultural Human Rights program at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami.
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Barbara Stark received a B.A. from Cornell, cum laude, a J.D. from NYU, and an LL.M. from Columbia. She has published more than 40 chapters and articles in the California and UCLA Law Reviews and the Yale, Stanford, Virginia, Vanderbilt and Michigan Journals of International Law, among others, and her book International Family Law: An Introduction was recently published by Ashgate.
Professor Stark has made more than 65 invited presentations at law schools and professional meetings throughout the world. In April 2004, she gave the Blaine Sloan Lecture in international law at Pace University School of Law and, in 2003-04, she was a distinguished visiting professor of international law at New England School of Law in Boston. Her courses include international law, international human rights, and international family law. In 2003, she was the College of Law Faculty Scholar at the University of Tennessee and has been a Fulbright senior specialist since 2002.
Professor Stark has served on the executive council of the American Society of International Law and currently serves on the executive committee of the AALS Sections of International Law and Family Law, which she chaired in 2004. She currently chairs the International Family Law Committee of the International Law Association, American Branch, and also serves on the editorial board of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Human Rights, to be published in 2008.
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Margaret Abraham is Professor of Sociology at Hofstra University, New York and served as chair from 2000 through 2003. She also served as Director of Women's Studies. Her areas of interest are ethnicity, migration, gender, domestic violence and the South Asian Diaspora. She is the author of Speaking the Unspeakable: Marital Violence Among South Asian Immigrants in the United States in Summer 2000. This book won the American Sociological Association: Section on Asian and Asian America Outstanding Book Award in 2002. Dr. Abraham has also presented papers at numerous conferences and published in various journals including Gender & Society, Violence Against Women, and the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She was the recipient of a Rockefeller fellowship. She has served on the boards of Sakhi for South Asian Women and the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA). She is also an advisory board member and consultant on national projects related to issues on violence against women. Dr. Abraham has been involved in research and activism in the field of domestic violence in the South Asian immigrant community for more than a decade. She has been honored for her work by Sakhi for South Asian Women, Indus Women Leaders, the Indian American Kerala Cultural and Civic Center, and the Office of the Executive, Nassau County, State of New York. Her work has been profiled and quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, India Abroad, Malayalam Pathram, India Today, Indiathink.com, and Rip Rap: The Academic Book Program.
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Amy Baehr, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hofstra University, is a graduate of Dickinson College, and received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her areas of specialization are contemporary political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law. She is editor of Varieties of Feminist Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2004). Her papers have appeared in Hypatia, the Journal of Social Philosophy, and the Journal of Political Philosophy. Her paper "Toward a New Feminist Liberalism" was anthologized in The Philosophy of Rawls (edited by Richardson and Weithman, 1999). Her most recent paper, "Feminism, Perfectionism, and Public Reason" is forthcoming in Law and Philosophy.
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Beverley Baines
The main focus of my writing has been on the Supreme Court of Canada's gender equality jurisprudence. Since editing The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence (with Ruth Rubio-Marin) in 2004, I published two articles on the interpretation of section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: "Is Substantive Equality a Constitutional Doctrine?" in Ysolde Gendreau, ed., La doctrine et le déloppement du droit/Developing Law with Doctrine (Montreal: Les Editions Thémis, 2005) 59, and "Equality, Comparison, Discrimination, Status" in Fay Faraday, M. Kate Stephenson, and Margaret Denike, eds., Making Equality Rights Real: Securing Substantive Equality under the Charter (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2006); as well as an article on "Section 28 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: A Purposive Interpretation" (2005) 17 CJWL 55.
Unexpectedly, I achieved notoriety late in life by co-authoring "Expanding Recognition of Foreign Polygamous Marriages: Policy Implications for Canada" with Martha Bailey, Bita Amani and Amy Kaufman, in Polygamy in Canada: Legal and Social Implications for Women and Children (Status of Women Canada, November 2005). I continue to tempt fate by examining the relationship between gender equality and religious freedom, not only in the context of polygamy, but also in the context of the Sharia family law arbitration controversy that arose recently in Ontario, having spoken most recently about these issues at the University of Oslo.
At Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, I am a Professor in the Faculty of Law, Head of the Department of Women's Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and cross-appointed to the School of Policy Studies where I teach Law and Public Policy.
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Lisa Merrill, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Rhetoric, and Performance Studies at Hofstra University. Her research focuses on theatrical and everyday performances of nationality, gender, and sexuality and their reception.
Lisa Merrill is an internationally acclaimed gender and performance historian and specialist in American Studies. She has been awarded a prestigious National Endowment of the Humanities senior scholar grant. She has been awarded National Communication Association's highest award in performance studies: the Lilla Heston Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies (2002). Her most recent book, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (University of Michigan Press) was awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book in Theatre or Drama by an American author.
Her publications in the field of gender and communication include numerous articles as well as the co-authored text, The Power to Communicate: Gender Differences as Barriers (Waveland Press, 1985, 1991, 1998) and the co-edited anthology, Untying the Tongue: Power, Gender, and the Word (Greenwood Press, 1998) and the co-edited "Pedagogy and Performance Issue" of Women and Performance Journal.
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Panelists and speakers
Martha Albertson Fineman
Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law
Martha Albertson Fineman received a B.A. from Temple University in 1971 and a J.D. in 1975 from the University of Chicago. She was the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School before going to Emory University in 2004 as a Robert W. Woodruff Professor.
A leading authority on family law and feminist legal theory, Fineman is the founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, an interdisciplinary Project begun at the University of Wisconsin in 1984. The Project examines issues of law and policy of particular interest to women. Her scholarly work focuses on various aspects of the legal regulation of intimacy. Fineman has won awards for her writing and teaching, including the prestigious Harry Kalven Prize for Distinguished Research in Law and Society.
As a corollary to her work in the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, Fineman has edited and contributed to several important collections of feminist legal theory. The first such collection, At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory, published in 1991, was the first published anthology of feminist legal theory.
Fineman's solely authored books include The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform (1991), which challenged the country's no-fault divorce reforms of the 1970's and 80's; The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (1995), which critically explored single motherhood, welfare reform, and marriage as social policy; and The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (2004), a radical reconception of the family in society in which she argues that the responsibility for dependency should be reallocated across societal institutions so that it does not remain privatized - assigned to the family in the first instance and within that family to women serving in their roles as mothers, wives, daughters and so on.
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Deborah Anker is a Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. She is the author of the leading treatise, Law of Asylum in the United States, and has drafted ground-breaking guidelines and amicus curiae briefs. Much of her work has focused on gender and gender violence as a basis for asylum, and she is currently involved in questions of asylum eligibility and trafficking, disability status, religious beliefs and family membership. Most recently Deborah has been researching exclusion from refugee status for Burmese, Nepalese and Colombian refugees. She speaks regularly at conferences as well as programs for continuing education and training of judges and lawyers, including most recently for the International Association of Refugee Law Judges. Deborah comes from a family with a proud public service tradition and loves being actively involved in a combination of practice, teaching and scholarship.
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Dr. Susanne Baer is a professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at the Law School of Humboldt University in Berlin. She has served as the Co-Director of the Feminist Legal Science Project and Director of the Gender Kompetenz Zentrum at Humboldt University, as well as Vice President for Academic and International Affairs. Dr. Baer studied law and political science at Freie University in Berlin, earned an L.L.M at the University of Michigan Law School, and received her Juris Doctor degree at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University. Since 2000, she has been a Visiting Faculty member at Central European University, in Budapest. She is the co- author of Comparative Constitutionalism (West Publishing, 2003), and her articles on such topics as citizenship, gender equality, anti-discrimination law, and human rights have appeared in many books and legal journals. Representative publications (in English) include: Citizenship in Europe and the Construction of Gender by Law in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights," in Karen Knop, ed., Gender and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2004); "Dignity or Equality? Responses to Workplace Harassment in European, German, and U.S. Law," in Catharine A. MacKinnon and Reva Siegel, eds., Directions in Sexual Harassment Law (Yale University Press, 2003); and "Equality: The Jurisprudence of the German Constitutional Court," 5 Columbia Journal of European Law 249 (1999).
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Karima Bennoune is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University School of Law - Newark where she teaches international law and human rights. She has previously taught at the Pepperdine School of Law - London Campus, the University of Toledo College of Law and at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to beginning her academic career, she served as a legal adviser for Amnesty International in London, England for four years, working on issues including women's human rights. She led the organization's delegation to the negotiations on the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. She also carried out field missions in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Pakistan and Tunisia. Recently, she served as a consultant to the organization's current campaign to stop violence against women and in developing its policy on human rights and terrorism. From 2003-2006 she was a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. During 2004 she carried out human rights missions to South Korea and Southern Thailand. In 2005, she was elected to the Board of Directors of Amnesty International - USA and appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights. In December 2005, she traveled to Afghanistan to interview former detainees captured during the "war against terrorism." Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law and the Michigan Journal of International Law. Her most recent article is entitled "Secularism and Human Rights: A Contextual Analysis of Headscarves, Religious Expression and Women's Equality Under International Law."
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Mary Anne Case is Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and 2006-7 Crane Fellow at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Her scholarship to date has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender and sexuality, although she also has done work on other aspects of constitutional and comparative law and on the early history of feminism. A graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School, she studied at the University of Munich and litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison before joining the faculty of the University of Virginia, where she rose to become Professor of Law and Class of 1966 Research Professor. She returned to her native New York City as a Visiting Professor of Law at N.Y.U. during the academic year 1996-7 and again in the spring of 1999. In the spring of 2004, she was a Bosch Public Policy fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. While at Princeton, she will continue her work on the role of the state in marriage.
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Jane Maslow Cohen is the Edward Clark Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law, Austin, Texas, where she teaches a course on Feminist Theory and its Legal Applications. Her writings on the law and policy of women's and children's lives have appeared in the Boston University Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Virginia Law Review, the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and the Harvard Journal of Women and the Law. Previously, she was a professor at the Boston University School of Law, after a career in practice that included family law.
Her e-mail address is: jcohen@mail.law.utexas.edu.
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Brenda Cossman joined the Faculty of Law in 1999, and became a full professor in 2000. She holds degrees in law from Harvard and the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate degree from Queen's. In 2002 and 2003, she was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, where she was the Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies.
Professor Cossman's teaching and scholarly interests include family law, freedom of expression, feminist legal theory, law and sexuality, and law and film. Her most recent book on Regulating Sexual Citizenship will be published by Stanford University Press in 2007. Her other books include the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision(Toronto); Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India(Sage), and Secularism's Last Sigh? (Oxford) She is also the co-editor of Privatization, Law and the Challenge to Feminism(Toronto).
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Maxine Eichner
Professor Eichner is an associate professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law. She received her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in political science from UNC while on the law school faculty. Before joining the faculty at UNC, she held clerkships with Judge Louis Oberdorfer on the District Court for the District of Columbia, and Judge Betty Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and fellowships from the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship and the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. She also practiced civil rights and employment discrimination law at Patterson, Harkavy, and Lawrence, in Raleigh, North Carolina. She teaches family law and sex equality, and is currently working on a book concerning the relationship between families and the state.
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Nancy J. Hirschmann is the R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton University Press 2003) won the 2004 Victoria Schuck award for the best book on women and politics from the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Gender, Class and Freedom in Modern Political Theory is currently in production with Princeton University Press. She is also the author of Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory (Cornell University Press 1992), and numerous articles. She is co-editor of Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory (Westview 1996), Women and Welfare: Theory and Practice in the United States and Europe (Rutgers 2001), and Feminist Interpretations of John Locke (Penn State, forthcoming February 2007). In January 2006 she was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her new project, "A Political Theory of Illness and Disability."
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Martha T. McCluskey is Professor of Law and William J. Magavern Fellow, State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. She teaches and writes about economic policy, equality, and critical legal theories. Recent articles include Thinking With Wolves: Left Legal Theory After the Right's Rise; The Substantive Politics of Corporate Power; and How Queer Theory Makes Neoliberalism Sexy: Economics and the Queer Challenge to Feminism; and Efficiency and Social Citizenship: Challenging the Neoliberal Attack on the Welfare State.
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Ziba Mir-Hosseini is an independent consultant, researcher and writer on Middle Eastern issues, specializing in gender, family relations, Islamic law and development. A Senior Research Associate at the London Middle Eastern Institute, SOAS, University of London, she obtained her BA in Sociology from Tehran University (1974) and her PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Cambridge (1980). She has held numerous research fellowships and visiting professorships, most recently: Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2004-5); Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at the School of Law, New York University (2002, 2004, 2006).
Dr Mir-Hosseini's publications include the monographs Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris, 1993, 2002), Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999; I. B. Tauris, 2000), and (with Richard Tapper) Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform (I. B. Tauris, 2006). She has also directed (with Kim Longinotto) two award-winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran: Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and Runaway (2001).
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Uma Narayan is Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. She is the author of Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism, and has co-edited several feminist anthologies. She is currently working on issues of gender, globalization and economic rights.
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Prof. Dr. iur. Anne Peters LL.M. (Harvard)
Anne Peters is Professor of Public International Law at the University of Basel, a position she has held since 2001. In the academic year 2004/05 she was Dean of the Faculty of Law. Prior to taking up the tenured post she was Assistant Professor at the Walther-Schücking-Institute of Public International Law at the Christian Albrechts University Kiel, where she obtained the Habilitation-qualification on the basis of her Habilitation-Thesis ;Elemente einer Theorie der Verfassung Europas" (Elements of a Theory of the Constitution of Europe). Born in Berlin in 1964, Anne Peters studied Law, Modern Greek and Spanish at the Universities of Würzburg, Lausanne, and Freiburg in Breisgau and pursued post-graduate studies at Harvard Law School. She was a fellow of the National Scholarship Fondation of the German People (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) and was awarded the prize from the Scientific Society at Freiburg im Breisgau for her doctoral dissertation on territorial referendums in international law in 1995.
Her research activities cover the field of general public international law, especially its constitutionalization, European constitutional law, constitutional theory and constitutional comparison and national and international human right. She has published extensively on questions of supranational global governance and global constitutionalism. Her publications include: Women, Quotas and Constitutions: A Comparative Study of Affirmative Action for Women in American, German, European Community and International Law (Kluwer Law International: Dordrecht/London/Boston 1999).
Anne Peters is a member of numerous academic societies and since 2004 a member of the executive board of the European Society for International Law.
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Elizabeth M. Schneider is the Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and has also been Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard and Columbia Law Schools. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 cum laude with Honors in Political Science. She was a Leverhulme Fellow at The London School of Economics and Political Science where she received an M.Sc. in 1969 and received a J.D. from New York University Law School, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow, in 1973. Professor Schneider clerked for United States District Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York in 1973, and was Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City and Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn Law School from 1973-1980. From 1980-1983 she was Staff Attorney and Acting Administrative Director of the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers Law School-Newark. During this time, she litigated many landmark civil rights and women's cases in federal and state courts around the country and did pioneering legal work on gender-bias and self-defense, particularly in cases of battered women who kill their assailants.
Professor Schneider teaches Civil Procedure, Women and the Law, and Battered Women and the Law, is Director of the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program at Brooklyn Law School and Chair of the Judicial-Academic Network of the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ). She has written many articles in the areas of civil rights and civil litigation, women's rights, violence against women, and women in legal education, both in the United States and abroad. Her book, Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking was published by Yale University Press in 2000 and won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Professional-Scholarly Publishing Award in Law; her law school casebook on domestic violence, Battered Women and the Law, co-authored with Professor Clare Dalton of Northeastern University Law School, was published by Foundation Press in 2001, and a second edition will be published in Fall 2007 (with Cheryl Hanna, Vermont Law School and Judith G. Greenberg, New England Law School, as new co-authors). She is currently working on a research project on gender and summary judgment in the federal courts. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad, most recently in South Africa, Vietnam and China, and has recently worked as a consultant to the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) on the Secretary-General's Report on Violence Against Women, which is being presented to the United Nations General Assembly in October 2006. She is also a frequent commentator for both print and broadcast media.
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Mary Lyndon (Molly) Shanley is Professor of Political Science on the Margaret Stiles Halleck Chair at Vassar College. She is author of Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, 1989), Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-Sex and Unwed Parents (Beacon, 2001), and Just Marriage, ed. Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen (Oxford University Press, 2004). She is editor, with Carole Pateman, of Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Penn State, 1990), with Uma Narayan, of Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Essays (Penn State Press, 1997), and with Iris Marion Young and Daniel I. O'Neill, Illusion of Equality: Engaging with Carole Pateman (Penn State, forthcoming).. Her articles and reviews have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals. Her current work is on feminist perspectives on social justice issues in family formation, and on bioethics and human reproduction. In her local community, she works on education about domestic violence and increasing services to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
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Katharine B. Silbaugh is Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, 2006-07; Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law. She is a graduate of Amherst College and the University of Chicago Law School. Her work focuses on family labor and its interaction with women's paid labor force participation and economic citizenship.
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Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities. He has published over 90 essays in academic journals, edited volumes and public interest publications, including the American Political Science Review, the Western Political Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, Daedalus, Social Research, Yale Law Journal, the American Prospect, the Nation, and others. He is author or co-author of five books: Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships (Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (with Philip A. Klinkner, 1999); Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997); Citizenship without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity (with Peter H. Schuck, 1985); and Liberalism and American Constitutional Law (1985, rev. ed.1990).
Civic Ideals received six "best book" awards: the Ralph J. Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association, the J. David Greenstone Prize of the APSA Politics and History Section, the David Easton Prize of the APSA Foundations of Political Theory Section, the Merle Curti Intellectual History Prize of the Organization of American Historians, the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association, and the "Government and Political Science Award" of the Association of American Publishers. It was a CHOICE Outstanding Book in 1998 and a Finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. The Unsteady March received the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. Smith's 1988 American Political Science Review article, "Political Jurisprudence, the 'New Institutionalism,' and the Future of Public Law," also received the 2004 Wadsworth Publishing Award of the APSA's Law and Courts section as a work of enduring influence published more than 10 years ago. He has also supervised 29 Ph.D. dissertations, six of which have won "best dissertation" prizes from the American Political Science Association in the fields of public law, racial and ethnic politics, and women and politics, as well as the "best dissertation" prize of the Law and Society Association.
Formerly the Alfred Cowles Professor of Government at Yale University, where he taught from 1980 to 2001, Smith received a Yale College Prize for Distinguished Teaching in the Social Sciences in 1984. He received a Carnegie Corporation of New York "Scholar's Grant" in 2001-2003 to research a book to be entitled Civic Horizons: Achieving Democratic Citizenship in Modern America. He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2002-2003 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In sum, he has been a real nerd for a long, long time.
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Anisseh Van Engeland-Nourai is a jurist and a political analyst. She holds a PhD from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, a Master in Laws from Harvard Law School, a Master in International Relations from Université Paris II - Assas, and a Master in Iranian Studies from Paris III --Sorbonne. She was previously a research assistant on terrorism, a research assistant on Islamic law and a visiting researcher on human rights at Harvard Law School. She has worked for NGOs around the world on issues such as capacity building, advocacy, women empowerment, refugees and immigration. Her field of expertise is international human rights, human rights in Iran, international humanitarian law, Islamic humanitarian law, refugees' issues, terrorism and torture. She has published articles in all these fields and is a consultant for several non governmental organizations, universities, research centers and think tanks worldwide. She is now an ICRC delegate. Her publications include: 'Torture and High Coercive Interrogations: Is there a Line under International Law?' in International Studies Journal (2006); 'Islamic Humanitarian Law and International Humanitarian Law: Two Visions of Just World?' in International Studies Journal (2006).
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Deborah M. Weissman
Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs
B.A., 1972, magna cum laude, J.D., 1975, cum laude, Syracuse University.
Weissman is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Syracuse. She has had extensive experience in all phases of civil rights and legal services advocacy, working on labor law and education-related civil rights law cases with the Legal Aid Society of Albuquerque, New Mexico from 1975 to 1980, on family law and civil rights impact cases with Bay Area Legal Service in Tampa, Florida from 1990 to 1994, and most recently, with Legal Services of North Carolina, where she served as deputy director from 1994 to 1995 and as executive director from 1996 to 1998. Weissman, who was also a partner in the civil rights firm of Heath, Rosenthal and Weissman in Syracuse, NY from 1980 - 1989, has worked on major litigation, administrative and legislative campaigns, and community outreach programs in many areas of law.
Weissman joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law faculty in 1998. She became the Director of Clinical Programs in 2001. She teaches domestic violence law, civil lawyering process, civil clinic, including immigration law matters, and a policy clinic addressing issues related to gender-based violence in the local and international realm which provide students with the opportunity to engage in law related projects addressing ongoing human rights initiatives in this area. Her research interests have focused on understanding and addressing problems of social justice.
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Professor Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law. A prize-winning author and expert on work/family issues, she is author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She has authored or co-authored four books and over fifty law review articles; her work is reprinted in casebooks on six different subjects; she has given over two hundred speeches and presentations in North and Latin America to groups as diverse as the National Employment Lawyers' Association, the Denver Rotary Club, the American Philosophical Association, and the Modern Language Association, and has lectured at virtually every leading U.S. university. Founding Director of WorkLife Law (WLL), she is also Co-Director of the Project on Attorney Retention (PAR). She has played a leading role in documenting workplace bias against mothers. Her "Beyond the Maternal Wall: Relief for Family Caregivers Who are Discriminated against on the Job," 26 Harvard Women's Law Review 77 (2003), (co-authored with Nancy Segal), was prominently cited in Back v. Hastings on Hudson Union Free School District, 2004 U.S. App. Lexis 6684 (2d Cir. April 7, 2004). She also has played a central role in organizing social scientists to document maternal wall bias, notably in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues (2004), co-edited with Monica Biernat and Faye Crosby, which was awarded the Distinguished Publication Award by the Association for Women in Psychology. In 2006, she received the Margaret Brent Award for Women Lawyers of Achievement. In 2007, she is scheduled to give the Massey Lectures on American Civilization at Harvard University. Her current work focuses on social psychology, and on how work/family conflict affects families across the social spectrum, with a particular focus on how caregiving issues arise in union arbitrations. For more information visit http://www.worklifelaw.org/ and http://www.pardc.org/
Professor Williams teaches property as well as courses related to gender, family and employment. She has two children. Her husband is a public interest lawyer specializing in privacy and internet issues.